Doing Something Extraordinary

Over at Absolut(ly) Fit, Laura has a great post about running marathons. She's done like eight already this year. Pretty soon, she'll pass my lifetime total, and I've been running them for eight years. Laura writes about how running has allowed her to transcend the ordinary to do something extraordinary. It's very true. Running is like that. We all run at different paces, different distances and for different reasons. Everyone who commits to distance running is, in some ways, doing something personally extraordinary. Let's face it, despite all the recent economic turmoil, our lives are incredibly easy. Modern life has afforded us with an embarrassing amount of luxuries and asks little of us regularly. Most of us sit in cubicles all day, more at risk of heart disease and boredom than anything else. Running is a way of breaking out of our mundane daily lives. My skeptical nature looks askance at the "you're all winners" mantra of marathons. I regard the race itself ambivalently. The big business marathons have become make them more about marketing and monetization. Yet there's something cool about them because each runner is doing something out of the ordinary. Alone but together. Noakes writes about how this is the epitome of competition: "to seek out in the company of others."

I thought about this a bit today during my 22-mile run, the farthest I'll go during training. I've gotten to the point where running 22 miles at a 7:45 pace isn't all that difficult. My only concern is a pain in my left shin. This is pretty new. I felt some tenderness there before during training, but it came on rather suddenly at about mile 16 of the run. I'm icing it right now, praying it's not something serious like my nightmare, a stress fracture. I get paranoid about injuries when I'm training. Otherwise, I feel fine. My new plan is to run a half marathon next weekend in Seaside Heights, NJ. Never been, although I did run the NJ Marathon a few years back, finishing in 3:04. Much of the race is along the boardwalk, which should be interesting. Getting there will be doubly interesting since I don't have a car. Time to use TTG's Budget employee discount code.

22 miles, 2:53:58